29 ms·

Microsoft researched what made employees happy

201 points by alok-g 4y ago

bawolff 4y ago
Is this really all that surprising? In school everyone always complains about group work sucking.
- haswell 4y ago
  I think this is a good anecdote that reiterates the kind of “collaboration” the article is talking about, but is not the “real” collaboration people strive for. The reason group projects in school felt so terrible was because the end goal was collaboration, not some higher outcome. Collaboration can unlock outcomes that can’t be achieved as an individual, but collaboration can’t be the desired end state.
  - pojzon 4y ago
    > The reason group projects in school felt so terrible was because the end goal was collaboration, not some higher outcome At least in my school the end goal was never collaboration but getting a good grade. Thus individuals who cared did most if not all work. Those group projects had sense only if you were paired with equally skilled and motivated ppl. And ofcourse you had to LIKE them. Its exteremely hard to be cooperative with ppl you consider as assholes.
    - haswell 4y ago
      I’m sure that was your end goal, but when someone assigns a collaborative project, it’s usually to teach students how to collaborate, while forgetting that just forcing a group to do the same task together is not the same thing as collaborating. It is from this base that problems emerge, IMO. Kind of like “synergy”, which is a real thing, but hard to define and difficult to artificially achieve.
- yodsanklai 4y ago
  > In school everyone always complains about group work sucking I supervised software engineering projects at university. It works well when students in a group have similar motivation and abilities. This is the case when they are free to choose who they collaborate with. Otherwise, students are usually frustrated. In a company, teams can be much more heterogeneous (cultural background, skills, age, social status, experience...), and the pressure is higher: goals can be loosely defined, evaluation is less fair, stakes are higher for everyone, managers can be less benevolent than teachers...
  - ergocoder 4y ago
    > managers can be less benevolent than teachers... Depend on what benevolent here means. It is much easier to address low performers in a company setting.
  - closeparen 4y ago
    In my corporate software projects, a particular engineer owns the outcome. They have lines of communication with the managers of other assigned engineers, and considerable pull in their performance reviews and promotions. The floor is that someone cares and the others will make what could be mistaken for a good-faith effort, which is lightyears better than a school project.
- ergocoder 4y ago
  Group work has all the bad attributes: - can't be fired - reward is low - members often have the exact skillset. - nobody has superior authority. How does one even make a decision where people disagree? Teachers have no experience working in the real world and will often say "you will need to learn to work with bad people". Meanwhile every successful person will tell you to fire bad people as soon as possible. If you assign a bunch of low performers to Steve Jobs and tell him he can't fire them and have to give them work, even Steve Jobs would probably fail.
  - lucb1e 4y ago
    School group work doesn't have to be bad. We had a semester-spanning 6-person group project during my software engineering study. Long story short, by the fourth and final semester project, I cooked up a recipe that solved some of these problems. I had re-invented having a manager. Because I was good at coding, and by this semester this was known so people trusted me to not just idle around, I could propose on day 1 that I'd just be the 'manager' with no assigned share of the work. I'd be the solver of problems as they popped up, the person that goes around making sure nobody is stuck and everyone can work. And also that everyone does work, which turned out to be important because the notorious Joel was assigned to us and, indeed, he barely showed up and didn't do work at home either. After some conversations, going back-and-forth, and spending time on this, I managed to convince the teachers to officially kick him out after about three weeks (into a ~half-year semester). The rest of the semester, I spent most of the project time helping with problems that others were stuck on. (Not that I was a superbly amazing coder, but two know more than one and this really helped our pace.) It's a real shame that was the last semester of that study because the setup worked like a dream. Two of the group members weren't so strong in coding and we were one person down with roughly the same workload (though for this, too, I had some time to spend on 'lobbying', and we got a slight reduction), but by juggling tasks correctly and sitting together when necessary, it ended up working really well. One guy in particular I remember wasn't too good at the job, but he would always work hard and, once unstuck, make good progress for the day. Great guy, always in good spirits, fun to work with and I'd hire him today if he applied despite the mediocre skills. I think knowing his strengths and weaknesses (knowing what tasks to assign and do some pair programming) is all you need to have a great colleague in him that cheers up five others and is still a net-positive in the amount of work done.
- closeparen 4y ago
  It is perhaps surprising to a management class that believes collaboration is the ultimate good in all circumstances and you can never have enough of it.
just_boost_it 4y ago
The structure of the experiment seems to have been just a correlation between collaborative hours and some measure of happiness. I wonder if the causation doesn't run the other way to what they propose though. When I'm happy in work, I don't really feel the need to have to work to grow my network outside my team. I have worked a job though where things just weren't clicking, so I did put more effort into trying to make them click by meeting people. That would have included getting involved in more projects, and doing a bit more collaborative work.
- drewcoo 4y ago
  This. Things aren't going so well at work? Work harder. Work more. Then burn out and quit, of course.
haswell 4y ago
I think there is a major framing issue here. Speaking for myself, and the many colleagues I’ve spoken to about this, collaboration isn’t the issue. “Collaboration” is the issue. I’ve had some of my most meaningful (and happiness-inducing) experiences at work when collaborating deeply with colleagues. I’ve had some of the most frustrating experiences at work when “collaborating”. The distinction simply being: “Collaboration” in the form of “interacting in realtime” or “existing in the same space” can also be 99% distraction. “Real” collaboration - the kind where the collective consciousness of the group results in outcomes that could not have been achieved solo - is where the magic lies. I’m absolutely happier with more autonomy and less distraction. But that is not the antithesis of collaboration. A pendulum that swings too far in the other direction will leave folks feeling isolated, and will reduce the potential of a group. Finding the right balance and distinguishing between real collaborative interaction vs. “acting out” something that looks like collaboration on the surface is critical.
- jokethrowaway 4y ago
  Collaboration has its place for when you need it. Sure, you can get great results despite paying the mental cost of collaborating (which is even higher if it's happening through a computer screen). The problem is that we see the great results of occasional collaboration and we want more of that. Creating more artificial collaboration when you're capable of doing the task by yourself will just be expensive (both in terms of salary and mental health): it's not the answer.
  - haswell 4y ago
    > Sure, you can get great results despite paying the mental cost of collaborating When I refer to the beneficial kind of collaboration, I’m referring to the kind where the cost of not collaborating is to not achieve the outcome at all. Paul McCartney is an excellent musician on his own. The Beatles achieved something as a group that no individual can achieve on their own. I agree that adding collaboration in a setting that doesn’t require it just adds mental cost. But in other settings, that mental cost is minimal compared to the enhanced output. > Creating more artificial collaboration when you're capable of doing the task by yourself will just be expensive We’re on the same page here. That’s what I mean by “Collaboration” in quotes. The kind that is not necessary. My main point/issue is that the article doesn’t seem to really acknowledge or explore that there is a good/bad kind. Just focusing on “employees need more time to do their actual work” is not useful if that employee’s actual work actually does require some form of collaboration. The ability to distinguish between the two seems to be the core issue that requires exploration.
jokethrowaway 4y ago
I dumped my last job exactly because collaboration became the mantra. I tried to effect change but leadership didn't listen and my team wanted to apply the collaboration koolaid and be good team members. Glad there's research I can point to.
shitpostbot 4y ago
underwater 4y ago
Some companies have a culture that favours meetings and cross-team builds over documentation and internal platforms. It might just be that someone doing more collaboration is working on more ill-defined problems, or are at a different part of the development cycle.
tpmx 4y ago
My experience: Collaborating closely with smart people makes you happy. It can be so exhilarating - in a sustained way for a long time, if you're lucky and the universe aligns correctly. And yes, frequent interruptions are okay in this context. You get into a rhythm.
indiantinker 4y ago
… and made Teams
- tester756 4y ago
  Teams are weird as fuck. They're relatively decent, but their chat is so shitty that student could rewrite it in a week and it'd work better, simply because s/he wouldnt come with an idea of pasting text's font too. I haven't found it to be useful over like two years of using Teams, but it creates problems very often. Discord's chat is times better and more reliable because on Teams sometimes you cannot escape from `` block
clumsysmurf 4y ago
> Does it, in fact, intimate that collaboration may have become a buzzword for a collective that is more a bureaucracy than a truly productive organism? I recently worked at a company that hired Agile consultants to install SAFe. We had PI planning each quarter, which ran for 3 full days. At its conclusion, the consultants, leaders, and PMO always called it "successful collaboration." I guess they were having lots of fun ... but the engineers were not. Most of it was us guessing estimates for things 6 weeks out, and management turning that into commitments. Needless to say, this whole circus became negative experience for almost all the producers.
- spaetzleesser 4y ago
  For people who don't know SAFe, here is the diagram: https://www.scaledagileframework.com/wp-content/uploads/delightful-downloads/2021/01/Scaled-Agile-Framework_Essential_A4-3.pdf https://www.scaledagileframework.com/wp-content/uploads/deli...
  - brikil 4y ago
    That reminds me of the cell biology diagrams from grade school.
  - pixelrevision 4y ago
    Lol they should just change the name of “agile” to “brittle” and go with the slogan of “processes over people”
    - encryptluks2 4y ago
      Agile has become exactly that. It is where you have people in marketing and business thinking they know more about tech than actual tech professionals.
  - semicolon_storm 4y ago
    Amazing how they can pack so much into a diagram yet still show absolutely nothing of value for understanding SAFe.
jpswade 4y ago
It says “five fewer collaboration hours”. It’s not clear how many hours of collaboration we’re talking. It’d be interesting to see the actual figures before drawing a conclusion. On one hand I can imagine if you’re spending all your time in meetings it would be frustrating, meanwhile I’ve what happens when teams don’t collaborate, it’s not a pleasant experience, it just causes tension to build up.
Madmallard 4y ago
I don't know if I would trust a scummy anti-customer company to know what works best for people.
Groxx 4y ago
Is there a link to the study anywhere? I'm curious what kind of "internal network" survives removing 17 people while being more productive. Certainly some do. But it means very very different things if their network was closer to 20 people or 200+.
- caminante 4y ago
  The ZDNet article links to the HBR article [0]. Which traces to this networking measurement article [1]. [0] https://hbr.org/2022/06/why-microsoft-measures-employee-thriving-not-engagement?utm_source=pocket_mylist https://hbr.org/2022/06/why-microsoft-measures-employee-thri... [1] https://hbr.org/2020/08/can-you-be-too-well-connected https://hbr.org/2020/08/can-you-be-too-well-connected
  - Groxx 4y ago
    Both of those mention "network" without really saying what they consider a network, and without even an average number, as far as can tell :/ they spend much more time talking about how many meetings and emails are involved. (And their meeting load sounds low! Dang, all of my managers have had like 30+ per week. Though I don't think I've ever sent as many emails as even their low end lists. Maybe they're just avoiding Teams...)
    - caminante 4y ago
      > and without even an average number, as far as can tell Taking their analysis at face value, the average/median doesn't matter. This was a relative comparison for people that were (i) motivated; and (ii) had work-life balance. "network" was a function of how many people you interacted with via email/meetings. It's not surprising that people with better work life balance had less interactions. It is slightly surprising (IMHO) that people with less interactions were also more motivated.
      - Groxx 4y ago
        It matters how much of a reduction 17 implies. Scale-free numbers can be extremely misleading. E.g. last half, I had about 350 separate people I DM'd. Per year I generally break 500. If you include the size of email groups I have sent messages to, I'm consistently over 1,000 most months, possibly over 2,000 (maybe even significantly more). Microsoft has around 180,000 employees, that number could trivially go much much higher if I worked there. 17 is nothing if that's the criteria. Probably just noise, and you'll likely get different results next year. For people I would consider to be my network... 30-40? Maybe 50? They're the ones I actually interact with repeatedly on purpose. Reducing that by 17 is substantial, and I don't think I'd be as useful if I cut that size.
andsoitis 4y ago
Collaboration is a means to an end, not a goal in itself.
greenthrow 4y ago
There's no one answer to what is going to make people happy. Some people prefer being solo, some people prefer a close knit team, and every variation. The key for people leaders is to let your team do what works best for them.
thenerdhead 4y ago
By reading the article, the word "collaborating" somewhat felt like they were referring to meetings based on the word used around the context of people's calendars and availability that week. Having less meetings and more individual contributor time will make anyone happy. You can at least do the job with that time and not stress that you will get it done that week with whatever artificial constraint that week has created based on the "collaboration" you were involved in. People like determinism, no surprises here.
anonymoushn 4y ago
What does "five fewer hours in their workweek span" mean?
- lucb1e 4y ago
  Yes. Let me also ask what 17 fewer collaborators mean. I work in a company with 7 employees, so I should work with negative ten people for optimum statistical happiness! Without the base values, the article's advice is subject to speculation, but I guess we could start with how the average bigcorp in 200? operated and go from there. Problem is, I don't know what those values were, either. What's also interesting to me is that working in a team of more than 17 people is (was?) normal, that seems like a lot of people to coordinate with (even at Deloitte, my direct coworkers (developers) were a group of 3 others, part of a larger team of maybe 40 (mostly pentesters) but they also all worked in smaller groups of 1-4). Daily stand-ups with 4 people were long enough for my taste.
drewcoo 4y ago
Why do they want happy workers and how do they measure happiness? When exactly did Microsoft abandon all the lessons of Peopleware[1]? And what about flow[2]? I recall people blocking out calendar time and putting do not disturb signs on their office doors[3] when they needed time to get into flow. Good managers helped make that happen. Does that not happen there anymore? [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/67825.Peopleware https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/67825.Peopleware [2] https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-flow-state-of-mind-How-successful-software-programmers-achieve-this-state?share=1 https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-flow-state-of-mind-How-succe... [3] We had actual offices, doubled up and individual. They had doors. It took almost 2 decades to finally work remotely so that I could have an office with a door again, this time in my home. Bliss!
twirlock 4y ago
SMAAART 4y ago
TL;DR: for Microsoft, it's "to be energized and empowered to do meaningful work."
sedatk 4y ago
I reckon that it's not the collaboration itself makes you unhappy, it's the contemporary methods used such as constant interruptions over a multitude of communication tools, frequent brain-melting meetings with no obvious purpose, not having a solid leadership leaving the team members to their own devices.
cosmiccatnap 4y ago
I think it should be healthy to be allowed to simply do your job if you are an engineer. If you are a good one you'll know when you need help and when you need to grind. Instead you are constantly in a state of being micro managed by people who think that if they have lots of meetings and gather lots of metrics that will increase productivity but it's a silly idea when you think about it The only thing that gets work done is well...doing work and any amount of time you take away from that isn't productive 9/10 times.
pjmorris 4y ago
FTA: "By combining sentiment data with de-identified calendar and email metadata, we found that those with the best of both worlds had five fewer hours in their workweek span, five fewer collaboration hours, three more focus hours, and 17 fewer employees in their internal network size."
- lucb1e 4y ago
  TL;DR^, came here to post the same quote (they are citing the original authors here). The rest of the article is filler and speculation based on this statement.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  It would be awfully useful to know what the baseline from which the 5 & 17 fewer reductions are based on.
- markmark 4y ago
  So if they are looking at calendar data does "five fewer collaboration hours" only mean five fewer hours in meetings? Some of the funnest and most productive work I've done was a project with three others where we were all in a single office. We were completely ad-hoc with working alone, pair programming, having quick design discussions, whatever was needed at the time. There was an enormous amount of collaboration (and an enormous amount of deep, solo work), but there were no meetings in my calendar. Meanwhile in pretty much any job I have had my happiness has gone down the more full my official calendar becomes.
alexklarjr 4y ago
Microsoft outlook and spreadsheets is what every employer crave obvsly
deleted 4y ago
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givemeethekeys 4y ago
I hope they mention money, because sufficient amount of money will make me very happy.
shmerl 4y ago
Reminds me this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOh6Nh8w6f8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOh6Nh8w6f8
spywaregorilla 4y ago
I've done some work adjacent to this. Not this project, not with microsoft. By internal network size they probably mean people you have a lot of traffic with in meetings and emails. Presuming they're competent they probably only look at interactions with small groups or 1:1. By collaboration they just mean meetings with coworkers. Without having read in detail, its likely just drawing correlations between communication metrics and survey results. Lots of companies are paralyzed big their meeting culture. It's not really a surprise to anyone. But the data can paint it a bit more clearly if people don't know quite how to articulate the problem. It's pretty much always the same in a large org.
gerdesj 4y ago
What this article is dancing around is: Our employees are doing fuck all or just enough and we have managed to create an environment that actively encourages this behaviour. You'd (not) be surprised how often this happens. $BIG_TECH hire people clever enough to look after themselves as well as their employer. Now, what makes people happy? This doesn't: https://hbr.org/2022/06/why-microsoft-measures-employee-thriving-not-engagement https://hbr.org/2022/06/why-microsoft-measures-employee-thri...?
daxfohl 4y ago
Yeah as long as I have a bunch of grunt work, unnecessary fire drills, canceled projects, 2 AM pages, and low pay I'm a happy camper.
deleted 4y ago
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outside1234 4y ago
They should research paying people at market next vs. not (current state) to see what the difference is :)
adenozine 4y ago
Is it not zoom calls and pizza parties? /s
partomniscient 4y ago
Pity it seems like they haven't researched what makes customers happy...
water8 4y ago
If people said their real feelings the results wluld be about 99.9% sex
_8j50 4y ago
What a joke. Anything but compensation. For the right salary I would be happy with all this.
donatj 4y ago
> By combining sentiment data with de-identified calendar and email metadata For some reason the idea of my company using my email and calendar for stats like this bugs me a lot more than the idea of just reading them directly.

201 points by alok-g 4y ago

bawolff 4y ago

Is this really all that surprising? In school everyone always complains about group work sucking.

haswell 4y ago
I think this is a good anecdote that reiterates the kind of “collaboration” the article is talking about, but is not the “real” collaboration people strive for. The reason group projects in school felt so terrible was because the end goal was collaboration, not some higher outcome. Collaboration can unlock outcomes that can’t be achieved as an individual, but collaboration can’t be the desired end state.
- pojzon 4y ago
  > The reason group projects in school felt so terrible was because the end goal was collaboration, not some higher outcome At least in my school the end goal was never collaboration but getting a good grade. Thus individuals who cared did most if not all work. Those group projects had sense only if you were paired with equally skilled and motivated ppl. And ofcourse you had to LIKE them. Its exteremely hard to be cooperative with ppl you consider as assholes.
  - haswell 4y ago
    I’m sure that was your end goal, but when someone assigns a collaborative project, it’s usually to teach students how to collaborate, while forgetting that just forcing a group to do the same task together is not the same thing as collaborating. It is from this base that problems emerge, IMO. Kind of like “synergy”, which is a real thing, but hard to define and difficult to artificially achieve.
yodsanklai 4y ago
> In school everyone always complains about group work sucking I supervised software engineering projects at university. It works well when students in a group have similar motivation and abilities. This is the case when they are free to choose who they collaborate with. Otherwise, students are usually frustrated. In a company, teams can be much more heterogeneous (cultural background, skills, age, social status, experience...), and the pressure is higher: goals can be loosely defined, evaluation is less fair, stakes are higher for everyone, managers can be less benevolent than teachers...
- ergocoder 4y ago
  > managers can be less benevolent than teachers... Depend on what benevolent here means. It is much easier to address low performers in a company setting.
- closeparen 4y ago
  In my corporate software projects, a particular engineer owns the outcome. They have lines of communication with the managers of other assigned engineers, and considerable pull in their performance reviews and promotions. The floor is that someone cares and the others will make what could be mistaken for a good-faith effort, which is lightyears better than a school project.
ergocoder 4y ago
Group work has all the bad attributes: - can't be fired - reward is low - members often have the exact skillset. - nobody has superior authority. How does one even make a decision where people disagree? Teachers have no experience working in the real world and will often say "you will need to learn to work with bad people". Meanwhile every successful person will tell you to fire bad people as soon as possible. If you assign a bunch of low performers to Steve Jobs and tell him he can't fire them and have to give them work, even Steve Jobs would probably fail.
- lucb1e 4y ago
  School group work doesn't have to be bad. We had a semester-spanning 6-person group project during my software engineering study. Long story short, by the fourth and final semester project, I cooked up a recipe that solved some of these problems. I had re-invented having a manager. Because I was good at coding, and by this semester this was known so people trusted me to not just idle around, I could propose on day 1 that I'd just be the 'manager' with no assigned share of the work. I'd be the solver of problems as they popped up, the person that goes around making sure nobody is stuck and everyone can work. And also that everyone does work, which turned out to be important because the notorious Joel was assigned to us and, indeed, he barely showed up and didn't do work at home either. After some conversations, going back-and-forth, and spending time on this, I managed to convince the teachers to officially kick him out after about three weeks (into a ~half-year semester). The rest of the semester, I spent most of the project time helping with problems that others were stuck on. (Not that I was a superbly amazing coder, but two know more than one and this really helped our pace.) It's a real shame that was the last semester of that study because the setup worked like a dream. Two of the group members weren't so strong in coding and we were one person down with roughly the same workload (though for this, too, I had some time to spend on 'lobbying', and we got a slight reduction), but by juggling tasks correctly and sitting together when necessary, it ended up working really well. One guy in particular I remember wasn't too good at the job, but he would always work hard and, once unstuck, make good progress for the day. Great guy, always in good spirits, fun to work with and I'd hire him today if he applied despite the mediocre skills. I think knowing his strengths and weaknesses (knowing what tasks to assign and do some pair programming) is all you need to have a great colleague in him that cheers up five others and is still a net-positive in the amount of work done.
closeparen 4y ago
It is perhaps surprising to a management class that believes collaboration is the ultimate good in all circumstances and you can never have enough of it.

just_boost_it 4y ago

The structure of the experiment seems to have been just a correlation between collaborative hours and some measure of happiness. I wonder if the causation doesn't run the other way to what they propose though. When I'm happy in work, I don't really feel the need to have to work to grow my network outside my team. I have worked a job though where things just weren't clicking, so I did put more effort into trying to make them click by meeting people. That would have included getting involved in more projects, and doing a bit more collaborative work.

drewcoo 4y ago
This. Things aren't going so well at work? Work harder. Work more. Then burn out and quit, of course.

haswell 4y ago

I think there is a major framing issue here. Speaking for myself, and the many colleagues I’ve spoken to about this, collaboration isn’t the issue. “Collaboration” is the issue. I’ve had some of my most meaningful (and happiness-inducing) experiences at work when collaborating deeply with colleagues. I’ve had some of the most frustrating experiences at work when “collaborating”. The distinction simply being: “Collaboration” in the form of “interacting in realtime” or “existing in the same space” can also be 99% distraction. “Real” collaboration - the kind where the collective consciousness of the group results in outcomes that could not have been achieved solo - is where the magic lies. I’m absolutely happier with more autonomy and less distraction. But that is not the antithesis of collaboration. A pendulum that swings too far in the other direction will leave folks feeling isolated, and will reduce the potential of a group. Finding the right balance and distinguishing between real collaborative interaction vs. “acting out” something that looks like collaboration on the surface is critical.

jokethrowaway 4y ago
Collaboration has its place for when you need it. Sure, you can get great results despite paying the mental cost of collaborating (which is even higher if it's happening through a computer screen). The problem is that we see the great results of occasional collaboration and we want more of that. Creating more artificial collaboration when you're capable of doing the task by yourself will just be expensive (both in terms of salary and mental health): it's not the answer.
- haswell 4y ago
  > Sure, you can get great results despite paying the mental cost of collaborating When I refer to the beneficial kind of collaboration, I’m referring to the kind where the cost of not collaborating is to not achieve the outcome at all. Paul McCartney is an excellent musician on his own. The Beatles achieved something as a group that no individual can achieve on their own. I agree that adding collaboration in a setting that doesn’t require it just adds mental cost. But in other settings, that mental cost is minimal compared to the enhanced output. > Creating more artificial collaboration when you're capable of doing the task by yourself will just be expensive We’re on the same page here. That’s what I mean by “Collaboration” in quotes. The kind that is not necessary. My main point/issue is that the article doesn’t seem to really acknowledge or explore that there is a good/bad kind. Just focusing on “employees need more time to do their actual work” is not useful if that employee’s actual work actually does require some form of collaboration. The ability to distinguish between the two seems to be the core issue that requires exploration.

jokethrowaway 4y ago

I dumped my last job exactly because collaboration became the mantra. I tried to effect change but leadership didn't listen and my team wanted to apply the collaboration koolaid and be good team members. Glad there's research I can point to.

shitpostbot 4y ago

underwater 4y ago

Some companies have a culture that favours meetings and cross-team builds over documentation and internal platforms. It might just be that someone doing more collaboration is working on more ill-defined problems, or are at a different part of the development cycle.

tpmx 4y ago

My experience: Collaborating closely with smart people makes you happy. It can be so exhilarating - in a sustained way for a long time, if you're lucky and the universe aligns correctly. And yes, frequent interruptions are okay in this context. You get into a rhythm.

indiantinker 4y ago

… and made Teams

tester756 4y ago
Teams are weird as fuck. They're relatively decent, but their chat is so shitty that student could rewrite it in a week and it'd work better, simply because s/he wouldnt come with an idea of pasting text's font too. I haven't found it to be useful over like two years of using Teams, but it creates problems very often. Discord's chat is times better and more reliable because on Teams sometimes you cannot escape from `` block

clumsysmurf 4y ago

> Does it, in fact, intimate that collaboration may have become a buzzword for a collective that is more a bureaucracy than a truly productive organism? I recently worked at a company that hired Agile consultants to install SAFe. We had PI planning each quarter, which ran for 3 full days. At its conclusion, the consultants, leaders, and PMO always called it "successful collaboration." I guess they were having lots of fun ... but the engineers were not. Most of it was us guessing estimates for things 6 weeks out, and management turning that into commitments. Needless to say, this whole circus became negative experience for almost all the producers.

spaetzleesser 4y ago
For people who don't know SAFe, here is the diagram: https://www.scaledagileframework.com/wp-content/uploads/delightful-downloads/2021/01/Scaled-Agile-Framework_Essential_A4-3.pdf https://www.scaledagileframework.com/wp-content/uploads/deli...
- brikil 4y ago
  That reminds me of the cell biology diagrams from grade school.
- pixelrevision 4y ago
  Lol they should just change the name of “agile” to “brittle” and go with the slogan of “processes over people”
  - encryptluks2 4y ago
    Agile has become exactly that. It is where you have people in marketing and business thinking they know more about tech than actual tech professionals.
- semicolon_storm 4y ago
  Amazing how they can pack so much into a diagram yet still show absolutely nothing of value for understanding SAFe.

jpswade 4y ago

It says “five fewer collaboration hours”. It’s not clear how many hours of collaboration we’re talking. It’d be interesting to see the actual figures before drawing a conclusion. On one hand I can imagine if you’re spending all your time in meetings it would be frustrating, meanwhile I’ve what happens when teams don’t collaborate, it’s not a pleasant experience, it just causes tension to build up.

Madmallard 4y ago

I don't know if I would trust a scummy anti-customer company to know what works best for people.

Groxx 4y ago

Is there a link to the study anywhere? I'm curious what kind of "internal network" survives removing 17 people while being more productive. Certainly some do. But it means very very different things if their network was closer to 20 people or 200+.

caminante 4y ago
The ZDNet article links to the HBR article [0]. Which traces to this networking measurement article [1]. [0] https://hbr.org/2022/06/why-microsoft-measures-employee-thriving-not-engagement?utm_source=pocket_mylist https://hbr.org/2022/06/why-microsoft-measures-employee-thri... [1] https://hbr.org/2020/08/can-you-be-too-well-connected https://hbr.org/2020/08/can-you-be-too-well-connected
- Groxx 4y ago
  Both of those mention "network" without really saying what they consider a network, and without even an average number, as far as can tell :/ they spend much more time talking about how many meetings and emails are involved. (And their meeting load sounds low! Dang, all of my managers have had like 30+ per week. Though I don't think I've ever sent as many emails as even their low end lists. Maybe they're just avoiding Teams...)
  - caminante 4y ago
    > and without even an average number, as far as can tell Taking their analysis at face value, the average/median doesn't matter. This was a relative comparison for people that were (i) motivated; and (ii) had work-life balance. "network" was a function of how many people you interacted with via email/meetings. It's not surprising that people with better work life balance had less interactions. It is slightly surprising (IMHO) that people with less interactions were also more motivated.
    - Groxx 4y ago
      It matters how much of a reduction 17 implies. Scale-free numbers can be extremely misleading. E.g. last half, I had about 350 separate people I DM'd. Per year I generally break 500. If you include the size of email groups I have sent messages to, I'm consistently over 1,000 most months, possibly over 2,000 (maybe even significantly more). Microsoft has around 180,000 employees, that number could trivially go much much higher if I worked there. 17 is nothing if that's the criteria. Probably just noise, and you'll likely get different results next year. For people I would consider to be my network... 30-40? Maybe 50? They're the ones I actually interact with repeatedly on purpose. Reducing that by 17 is substantial, and I don't think I'd be as useful if I cut that size.

andsoitis 4y ago

Collaboration is a means to an end, not a goal in itself.

greenthrow 4y ago

There's no one answer to what is going to make people happy. Some people prefer being solo, some people prefer a close knit team, and every variation. The key for people leaders is to let your team do what works best for them.

thenerdhead 4y ago

By reading the article, the word "collaborating" somewhat felt like they were referring to meetings based on the word used around the context of people's calendars and availability that week. Having less meetings and more individual contributor time will make anyone happy. You can at least do the job with that time and not stress that you will get it done that week with whatever artificial constraint that week has created based on the "collaboration" you were involved in. People like determinism, no surprises here.

anonymoushn 4y ago

What does "five fewer hours in their workweek span" mean?

lucb1e 4y ago
Yes. Let me also ask what 17 fewer collaborators mean. I work in a company with 7 employees, so I should work with negative ten people for optimum statistical happiness! Without the base values, the article's advice is subject to speculation, but I guess we could start with how the average bigcorp in 200? operated and go from there. Problem is, I don't know what those values were, either. What's also interesting to me is that working in a team of more than 17 people is (was?) normal, that seems like a lot of people to coordinate with (even at Deloitte, my direct coworkers (developers) were a group of 3 others, part of a larger team of maybe 40 (mostly pentesters) but they also all worked in smaller groups of 1-4). Daily stand-ups with 4 people were long enough for my taste.

drewcoo 4y ago

Why do they want happy workers and how do they measure happiness? When exactly did Microsoft abandon all the lessons of Peopleware[1]? And what about flow[2]? I recall people blocking out calendar time and putting do not disturb signs on their office doors[3] when they needed time to get into flow. Good managers helped make that happen. Does that not happen there anymore? [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/67825.Peopleware https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/67825.Peopleware [2] https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-flow-state-of-mind-How-successful-software-programmers-achieve-this-state?share=1 https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-flow-state-of-mind-How-succe... [3] We had actual offices, doubled up and individual. They had doors. It took almost 2 decades to finally work remotely so that I could have an office with a door again, this time in my home. Bliss!

twirlock 4y ago

SMAAART 4y ago

TL;DR: for Microsoft, it's "to be energized and empowered to do meaningful work."

sedatk 4y ago

I reckon that it's not the collaboration itself makes you unhappy, it's the contemporary methods used such as constant interruptions over a multitude of communication tools, frequent brain-melting meetings with no obvious purpose, not having a solid leadership leaving the team members to their own devices.

cosmiccatnap 4y ago

I think it should be healthy to be allowed to simply do your job if you are an engineer. If you are a good one you'll know when you need help and when you need to grind. Instead you are constantly in a state of being micro managed by people who think that if they have lots of meetings and gather lots of metrics that will increase productivity but it's a silly idea when you think about it The only thing that gets work done is well...doing work and any amount of time you take away from that isn't productive 9/10 times.

pjmorris 4y ago

FTA: "By combining sentiment data with de-identified calendar and email metadata, we found that those with the best of both worlds had five fewer hours in their workweek span, five fewer collaboration hours, three more focus hours, and 17 fewer employees in their internal network size."

lucb1e 4y ago
TL;DR^, came here to post the same quote (they are citing the original authors here). The rest of the article is filler and speculation based on this statement.
dredmorbius 4y ago
It would be awfully useful to know what the baseline from which the 5 & 17 fewer reductions are based on.
markmark 4y ago
So if they are looking at calendar data does "five fewer collaboration hours" only mean five fewer hours in meetings? Some of the funnest and most productive work I've done was a project with three others where we were all in a single office. We were completely ad-hoc with working alone, pair programming, having quick design discussions, whatever was needed at the time. There was an enormous amount of collaboration (and an enormous amount of deep, solo work), but there were no meetings in my calendar. Meanwhile in pretty much any job I have had my happiness has gone down the more full my official calendar becomes.

alexklarjr 4y ago

Microsoft outlook and spreadsheets is what every employer crave obvsly

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givemeethekeys 4y ago

I hope they mention money, because sufficient amount of money will make me very happy.

shmerl 4y ago

Reminds me this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOh6Nh8w6f8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOh6Nh8w6f8

spywaregorilla 4y ago

I've done some work adjacent to this. Not this project, not with microsoft. By internal network size they probably mean people you have a lot of traffic with in meetings and emails. Presuming they're competent they probably only look at interactions with small groups or 1:1. By collaboration they just mean meetings with coworkers. Without having read in detail, its likely just drawing correlations between communication metrics and survey results. Lots of companies are paralyzed big their meeting culture. It's not really a surprise to anyone. But the data can paint it a bit more clearly if people don't know quite how to articulate the problem. It's pretty much always the same in a large org.

gerdesj 4y ago

What this article is dancing around is: Our employees are doing fuck all or just enough and we have managed to create an environment that actively encourages this behaviour. You'd (not) be surprised how often this happens. $BIG_TECH hire people clever enough to look after themselves as well as their employer. Now, what makes people happy? This doesn't: https://hbr.org/2022/06/why-microsoft-measures-employee-thriving-not-engagement https://hbr.org/2022/06/why-microsoft-measures-employee-thri...?

daxfohl 4y ago

Yeah as long as I have a bunch of grunt work, unnecessary fire drills, canceled projects, 2 AM pages, and low pay I'm a happy camper.

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outside1234 4y ago

They should research paying people at market next vs. not (current state) to see what the difference is :)

adenozine 4y ago

Is it not zoom calls and pizza parties? /s

partomniscient 4y ago

Pity it seems like they haven't researched what makes customers happy...

water8 4y ago

If people said their real feelings the results wluld be about 99.9% sex

_8j50 4y ago

What a joke. Anything but compensation. For the right salary I would be happy with all this.

donatj 4y ago

> By combining sentiment data with de-identified calendar and email metadata For some reason the idea of my company using my email and calendar for stats like this bugs me a lot more than the idea of just reading them directly.